


sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you

by fairmanor



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anxiety, Conversations, Fluff, Introspection, Late Nights, M/M, Overthinking, Patrick Brewer loves David Rose, Sebastien Raine - Freeform, Set somewhere late season 5, Sleeplessness, brief mention of revenge porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:54:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29809395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: This is the first time it’s happened to David here.Or; on the day that marks a year since Sebastien came to town, David can't sleep. He works through some lingering feelings about his past.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 44
Kudos: 216





	sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you

**Author's Note:**

> Okay I'm not entirely sure if this fic really works since I kind of forced it out to cure my writer's block, but David comparing his past and present while he's happy in Schitt's Creek is one of my absolute top tier fic jams and I liked writing this. I hope you enjoy it!

This is the first time it’s happened to David here.

During the first few months, it was too obvious why he had trouble sleeping. The cold room, an unfamiliar quietness outside, punctured only by Alexis’ freight train snoring once it hit around two in the morning.

After that, once the bubbling, boiling mess of his life settled into a manageable simmer, sleepless nights were usually because of drunken antics or late-night walks or giddiness from promises made in parked cars. Normal things. Human things.

But this is a different kind of sleeplessness. The one he was once most used to. If he’s honest, he’d almost forgotten about it. The way menial things pick at the edges of his mind, burrowing inwards, much more painful than they have any right to be. It makes the outside of him painful too, jostling him from side to side until he feels like a lump of stiff limbs and pulled muscle writhing beneath a net of blanket.

He doesn’t quite get to that point tonight. He already knows he won’t be able to sleep; he’s been in silent agony all day, a slew of awful thoughts rewriting the very sequence of him until all he can think is _it’s today, it’s today, it’s today._

At least it’s not a lie. At least this isn’t some stupid unfounded fear. It _is_ today.

Today marks a year since Sebastien Raine sauntered into this _terrifying and important_ place and reminded David that old wounds don’t stay closed without a fight. Today marks a year since David smashed his memory card, but was still left with a familiar pull of fear that Sebastien might have written an article about him or took photos of David in his sleep or recorded him with a wire or –

“David?”

There’s a slam behind David, making him jump and stiffen on the couch. He hears the key turning in the lock, the sound of it more familiar by the day, and the apartment fills with the smell of rogan josh.

Forcing himself to relax, he tips his head back and accepts Patrick’s kiss. David wrinkles his nose when he pull away.

“You’re still sweaty,” he says, wiping his upper lip.

“I didn’t shower in the changing rooms,” Patrick says, moving towards the kitchen as he speaks. “I was too cold, it would’ve given me chilblains.”

David just hums. He can hear Patrick whistling as he switches on the oven and unpacks the lukewarm takeout, ready to reheat.

He doesn’t want to look. That tends to happen when David’s thinking about the past. He physically can’t look at Patrick, let alone the streets of the town or his motel room. He doesn’t want to infect the now with those memories.

_Like chilblains,_ he thinks with an ironic smile. Moving from cold to warm too quickly will mess him up, and he has to protect himself.

Thankfully, Patrick doesn’t notice David’s discomfort as he heads into the bathroom to shower. If it were a normal day, David might make a joke about the mud coating Patrick’s knees or warn him not to come anywhere near the bed if he’s got even a speck of dirt on him. If it were a normal day, and Patrick were dirty, David would probably try and make Patrick sleep on the couch even though it’s Patrick’s bed. Patrick’s space. Because for some reason, David’s opinions are free range here, allowed to inhabit. Because that’s how things are now.

But it’s not a normal day. It’s the day Sebastien Raine came to Schitt’s Creek a year ago, and David doesn’t know how to act.

When Patrick comes out of the shower, David eats in silence. He can tell by the spices and the fluffiness of the naan that Patrick went to the good takeout in Elmdale. The rain has started again outside, battering on the window like frozen hail, but Patrick has put the electric fire on and the curry is rich and hot and…it would be exactly what David needs, if this was a normal day. But it’s not.

Patrick’s rambling about practice, not really acknowledging that David isn’t responding. They have a lot of conversations like that, both comfortable and secure even when the other isn’t listening because it’s never really one-sided when they’re together.

When Patrick’s rant about Elm Glen’s new left winger’s annoying possession stat lulls into a companionable silence, David brings it up. He knows Patrick is going to misinterpret it at first, but he brings it up.

“I’m not going to sleep tonight.”

Patrick doesn’t look fazed, as David expected. “Oh, okay. Are you sure you want to head back in the rain? I could drive you, but there’s still the walk from the –”

David cuts him off with a _mm-mm,_ his mouth still full of rice. He swallows, waving a hand in front of them both. “No, I’m staying here, but I just – I _won’t_ sleep tonight. I think. I know.”

Patrick’s mouth twists a little to the side, his tongue darting out to catch the sauce on his lip, and he turns to David in full. “Do you want to talk about why?”

Something both deep and surface-level within David unravels. Relaxes. Patrick’s gotten a lot better at this since the start of their relationship, and David is grateful for it. When they met, Patrick was accustomed to being constantly on his toes, trying his hardest to paper over any cracks he saw so he could avoid what was burning in the middle. He carried it with him into their own early days, manifesting in too many apologies and a week of gifts. It had left David feeling bombarded at first, worried that he’d accidentally push Patrick away out of fear for that beautiful earnestness, but Patrick learned. He learned, and now David can say things to Patrick and let him take care of them.

“It’s – a whole year has gone by now since Sebastien came here.”

Patrick’s hand is already resting on David’s forearm, draped along the back of the couch, and he rubs it gently.

“Ah. Okay.”

“I know I shouldn’t be getting caught up thinking about this stuff,” he amends quickly. “And I know you’re probably sick of hearing it, but –”

“David” – Patrick holds up a hand, smiling fondly – “it’s okay. You’re allowed to feel whatever you’re feeling right now, that’s not up to me. Is there anything in particular that’s bothering you about it?”

David sinks back into the couch cushions. “Theoretically, it shouldn’t be bothering me because I destroyed his memory card. The most recent thing I ever heard was that he was opening some tiny niche show all the way out in Berlin. But still…” he clears his throat, bedding himself further down as though by simple immersion into Patrick’s things will make him immune to the rest of the world. “Still. When I – when I knew him, he waited a year after we broke up to publish some of the worst stuff he had on me. It caught me completely off guard, and now it’s been a year for _this,_ and I just…”

He’s breathing faster know. He knows he’s breathing faster even if he can’t fully feel it, because Patrick has gathered him into his arms and started rubbing a hand up and down his back.

“I just keep thinking about how I woke up with my phone absolutely blowing up, everyone asking me what the fuck I’d done and why there were pictures like that of me all over the exhibition flyers. And I just hate the idea of waking up to find everything falling down around me again. So I can’t – I won’t sleep. I can’t sleep.”

David doesn’t even realise he’s crying until Patrick pulls away a fraction and David can see the dark patch on his T-shirt. He mumbles an apology, wet and burbling through his tears, but Patrick just shakes his head with a soft “no” and threads his fingers through David’s hair, soft and deliberate.

He lets him cry. That’s another thing about this space, this place that David’s found himself in. There’s more than his opinions and his standards and his flailing, ranting arms that are allowed to flourish. Somewhere in the past year he’s cracked into the deepest parts of himself, laid them bare and let them start to heal. It’s funny, he thinks, how his galleries were dedicated to _art,_ one of the rawest expressions of emotion, yet he’d done nothing but there except lay trapped with so many thoughts and nowhere to put them.

“I’ll be right back, okay?” Patrick says softly, extracting himself from the hold and standing up. David can hear him rustling through something soft before he returns with two pairs of pyjamas.

David sniffs thickly. “Patrick, I just told you that I –”

“I know, I know. You’re not sleeping.” Patrick throws the pyjamas down where he’d been sitting and picks up the empty takeout containers. “But we’re hardly going to be comfortable in our jeans at two in the morning, are we?”

_We._

If it weren’t 9pm on a rainy Tuesday, David gets the overwhelming urge that he would have proposed to Patrick on the spot. (He has plans for that, of course. He just hopes Patrick doesn’t beat him to it.)

“If you’re not going to sleep,” Patrick says, sinking down and bringing his arm around David, “then neither am I. I can’t have you sitting up getting annoyed at my snoring while you’re over here trying to – well, whatever you were planning on doing alone.”

“Probably biting my nails into stubs and bouncing my leg,” David says, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand.

Patrick leans in and breathes into David’s neck before placing a firm kiss there. “Well we can’t have that, can we? Get changed. I’ll be back over in a minute with some tea.”

And instead of coddling him, instead of persuading him to sleep, Patrick comes back over with tea and chocolate and puts the TV on and just lets it be. Of course, they wouldn’t be going to sleep this early anyway on a normal day, but this isn’t a normal day. David’s pretty sure Patrick is the only person in his life that could make such a day feel normal. Yet special, at the same time. Taken care of. Safe.

He curls himself into Patrick and they watch two movies back to back, saying very little other than vague commentary on the acting choices and inaccurate period clothing. David checks the clock after the second one’s credits finish rolling, tinging with disappointment when he realises it’s only just gone one. He looks up at Patrick expectantly.

“You tired yet?”

Oh, and that’s the other thing he’s been saying. Patrick laughs at him.

“No, David, not since you asked half an hour ago,” he says patiently. “It’s fine. I used to do this all the time in college.”

“Well, you’re _definitely_ not in college anymore,” David jibes, earning a prod to his waist. He jerks away when Patrick does it again, retaliating with his own scritches at Patrick’s sides.

“No – _no!_ You know I’m ticklish there, stop –”

Patrick ends up wriggling free from David’s grip and plonks down on top of him, knocking half the wind out of him. David coughs through his laughter, hugging Patrick close.

“Well, someone’s got a lot of pent-up energy,” David says. Patrick wiggles his eyebrows at David suggestively, even though they already know neither of them are in the mood. He shoves Patrick off him, sits up and says, “So tell me about all-nighter college Patrick. What was he like? What did he do while all his goody two-shoes roommates were asleep?”

Patrick shrugs, pulling his T-shirt back down over his stomach. “I mostly just walked. There were a few paths on campus that would stay lit all night, so I’d take one of three routes and sit down at the edge of the lake outside the sports complex.”

“Well, that sounds like an aesthetic waiting to happen.”

“It was calm,” Patrick says. “Sometimes a friend would join me, sometimes not. I preferred it when no one was there. It was easier to think.”

David takes a sip of tea – he’s not sure how many cups this is now – and nestles back into the couch. “I used to do the same in New York,” he says. “Sometimes I felt so dragged down by what everyone else was thinking and doing that I had to make up lost time for myself at night. When other people were there, I could never get a second in edgeways no matter what I was doing.”

Patrick’s eyes widen and he leans forward, everything on his face screaming familiarity. “Right? Half the time I used to wonder if I was just copying everyone else. I didn’t know how to act, so I just nodded and smiled half the time and hoped it was – ah, I don’t know. You get it.”

David does get it. He doesn’t push, because Patrick’s prodded this particular wound a couple of times now and David knows Patrick doesn’t want to delve into it all right now.

It’s been a couple of hours, and he hasn’t thought about Sebastien much until now. His stomach fills with lead as David thinks about how young he was, how impressionable and stupid and so horrifyingly alike to everyone else he met.

David claps a hand to his eyes, a drawn-out whine escaping from his closed mouth.

Patrick turns to look at him. “What?”

“God, I was so like him,” David says, and he can’t decide if he’s cringing or a bit heartbroken. “If I’d come here without having lost everything, I would have acted the same as him. I would have flashed myself about and treated everyone like art pieces and _God,_ I was so insufferable.”

Once Sebastien had left, David had interrogated Moira. He wrung out every detail of her conversation with Sebastien and acted like he was some kind of detective who knew better how to protect people from Sebastien Raine. Like he could actually do something with the information and stop it from happening again, even though that couldn’t have been damn further from the truth. Apparently, experience doesn’t make you an expert. Experience doesn’t mean you’re immune, or know what’s coming next.

“He called it _terrifying and important,”_ David says, the memory of his conversation with Moira hitting him more vividly.

“What, this place?”

David gestures around. “I guess. The place, the scenery. And it – it scared me, I think. Because even though I’m not like him, and I _know_ I’m not like him…that’s what this place is to me.”

David’s not sure how he can word it more honestly than that. This place is terrifying to him. It’s important to him. It’s more than those things, so much more than it could ever have been to Sebastien, but still. The comparison hurts. The fact that Sebastien said it so carelessly, so pretentiously, hurts.

“You know the difference though, David?” Patrick says, resting a hand on David’s knee and tracing light circles. “You mean it. You know what it means to find this place – whatever it was he said. That’s what being an artist is. He wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“I wouldn’t say me being here is _art._ I’m just here. Still getting used to it, sometimes. I’m not really thinking about the fancy bigger picture or the future or the past or any of that. It’s just…normal.”

Patrick shrugs. There’s a look on his face, calm, earnest, _terrifying, important,_ that tells David to fill in the blank.

“Isn’t that kind of the point?”

He strokes a knuckle over David’s cheek, and then David’s done for. He feels his throat closing up, not in panic but in relief, as the tears start to spill over his cheeks.

He’s not like Sebastien. He’s not like any of them, no matter how many contorted positions they used to bend him into. No matter how many days he woke up to find out what this David Rose-like person, this person who was never really him, had done. No matter how many shocks to the system or gritted teeth, David will always be himself while he’s here. No one else.

David doesn’t know what time it is when Patrick puts the TV back on and they let one of those absurd late-night History Channel documentaries play in the background. About halfway through, his attention is diverted by a box in the corner of the room. He points at it.

“What’s that?”

Patrick follows his finger, then smiles bashfully. “Oh, it’s my costume for Cabaret. Your mom dropped it off yesterday.”

David’s mouth drops open. “And she didn’t _tell_ me?”

“Well…I kind of told her not to,” Patrick admits.

“What? Why?!”

Patrick blushes, his hand coming up to scratch the back of his neck the way he always does when he’s flustered. “It’s embarrassing!”

David warms up inside at the sight of his boyfriend squirming in his seat. “Come on, honey. I’m going to have to see it when you’re on stage.”

Hit by a burst of energy, David jumps up and makes his way to the kitchen. He interrupts Patrick’s protests with a series of noises as he digs around for ice cream, then leans against the counter expectantly until Patrick gives in.

“Fine. Fine, but you have to promise you’re not going to laugh.”

“Only if you promise to do your dance.”

“David!”

“What self-respecting theatre kid has not made an absolute fool of themselves in their room at night before?” David argues around a mouthful of ice cream. “Come on, do it to kill some time.”

Patrick sighs, but he’s smiling. David can tell he likes this too; this ability to be silly together, to laugh and make dumb noises and flail about in this space. Their space.

David digs into his ice cream, not realising until he’s finished half a pint that Patrick has been dressed and leaning against the armchair for minutes now. When he looks up, he’s greeted with whites and blacks and bows and suspenders.

“Wilkommen, meine Liebe,” Patrick drawls, and it’s awful and hilarious and definitely turning him on. It’s the best thing David’s ever seen.

“Oh my _God.”_

Patrick’s getting into it now. “Put the music on. I have the album on my phone.”

David settles himself on the couch as the overture starts, and Patrick positions himself behind the bathroom door before bursting out and working his way through the routine. Except for a couple of missed steps and forgotten words, Patrick’s almost note-perfect and David is surprised by how impressed he is. Patrick is talented, he already knew that, but this is different. This is him in a colour palette he’d never wear, a song he’d never sing, a shape he’d never inhabit, and he’s throwing himself into it with joyful abandon.

“And then I’d go like this – _ow, shit –_ not like that, like this –” And David can’t help but laugh as Patrick continues to thrash himself around. He’s jumping towards David now, his legs bent and outstretched as he gyrates his way forward, spinning obnoxiously in David’s face.

Patrick collapses on David when the song ends with a loud exhale and an “oh, thank God”. David leans down to kiss him, soft and messy and tasting like ice cream, and he doesn’t stop until he’s on top of Patrick, firm hands at the small of his back and a hand in his hair.

They could lose centuries like that, David thinks. Kissing Patrick would be the first thing to spring to mind if someone asked him to kill time, only it’s not killing time at all. It’s cherishing it, filling it anew, helping David forget why he’s up at this godforsaken hour in the first place.

Patrick looks up at him sleepily when they finally break apart, running the pad of his finger across David’s spit-slick lip.

“Can I get out, please?” he says softly. “I wanna get changed.”

David smiles. He can tell Patrick’s tired now, and it’s okay because he’s feeling the same. He’s still tinged with a worry, still expecting his phone to explode with a hundred notifications from the people and the news apps he could never quite bring himself to delete, but it’s been dampened by hours of talking and watching and everything and nothing with Patrick by his side. When Patrick’s here, when he can lose time like this but not really lose it at all, then –

It hits him.

He murmurs it first, while Patrick is still pulling his pyjama pants on. He turns around. “Hm?”

“What I don’t know can’t hurt me,” David repeats, reaching for his face-down phone on the coffee table.

Patrick sits down. He watches David unlock his phone, watches the last of the tension fall away from his shoulders as he sees he has no new notifications.

They say nothing, silently curled up together as they work through every section of David’s phone. The old photos, the old contacts, the search history on his Maps app. Every news site, every gossip blog. It’s stripped down to its bare essentials, terrifying and important as all things are, until all that’s left is the shining, healed skin of David’s new life. 

“See? All gone,” Patrick says gently, resting his hand on David’s back.

“What if I go looking for it all again?” David whispers. “What if it comes looking for me?”

Patrick pulls David into his side and presses a kiss to the top of his head.

“Then I will be here, and we’ll get through it together.”

* * *

“David?”

There’s a brush of warmth on his cheek that wasn’t there five minutes ago. Which is when he closed his eyes, he’s sure of it.

When he opens them, Patrick is kneeling in front of him, tea in hand. He’s not dressed, but he definitely didn’t just wake up.

“Mm? What time is it?”

“It’s just gone ten,” Patrick says.

David twists where he’s laid, trying to sit up. “The store –”

“– Is closed for the day, and we’re going to sleep.”

David sighs, slumping back down on the couch. “Lift me to the bed.”

“No,” Patrick says, stroking David’s hair, “the last time I tried that we both pulled a muscle.”

David moans, but he can feel himself smiling. Patrick kisses the top of his head and pads back to bed, tea in hand, as David reaches for his phone. He jolts a little when he sees there’s a notification, but then he looks closer. It’s just Stevie sending him a middle finger and Alexis sending him ten kissing emojis. Nothing more. For once there aren’t a million gossip articles clogging his screen, and he can see the picture of him and Patrick from last Christmas on the background. For once there’s no ghost of a long-dead past waiting to creep up on him. There’s nothing he’s waiting for, now that he’s tucked it safely out of reach from this haven of his.

For once he can breathe.


End file.
